Woman with autism speaks at event sponsored by Algiers Charter Schools in Harvey

As a child, Deborah Lipsky showed little interest in dolls, tea parties or other kinds of play that evoke images of young girlhood, so her mother once tried to interest her in playing dress-up by inviting her and another girl from the neighborhood to raid the family’s closets.

Deborah Lipsky recently related her experiences to a group of speech therapists from schools around the New Orleans area during a seminar in Harvey sponsored by the Algiers Charter Schools Association.

The result was slightly unexpected.

Lipsky attired herself and her friend in her father’s suit coats, endearingly oversized. Her mother had more feminine outfits in mind, Lipsky said, but she wasn’t specific about it when she set up the activity. And when you’re talking to an autistic person, Lipsky advised, you need to be specific.

Now she is 49, lives on a farm in Maine, writes books and travels the country delivering speeches on what it’s like to live with a neurological disorder that alters social and communication skills. She learned at the late age of 44 that her history of sometimes eccentric behavior, including meltdowns at school and repeated mishaps, miscommunications and traumas throughout her life, could be explained to a large degree by the fact that she has a mild form of autism.

It wasn’t discovered sooner, she said, because her case of high-functioning autism allows her to appear and act similarly to someone without the disorder much of the time.

She recently related her experiences to a group of speech therapists from schools around the New Orleans area during a seminar in Harvey sponsored by the Algiers Charter Schools Association. Patty Spampneto, executive director of exceptional student services for the association, said Lipsky gave the educators a chance to gain a more practical understanding of how to approach autism.

“You have to be very concrete and literal when you’re talking to people with autism,” she advised the audience gathered at La Maison Creole event hall. “You have to be extremely specific. You have to be very detail-orientated.”

Obsessive behavior

Lipsky described the sensory overload often felt by people with autism.

She lowers her baseball cap as a shield against light and stress, not because she’s trying to be anti-social, she said. When she avoids eye contact with others, it is because she struggles to process more than one input simultaneously, not to show disengagement.

“Why do you insist on ‘Look at me while I’m talking to you?’ ” she asked. “You make me look and listen at the same time.

“This is why the lunch bunch is very difficult. When we’re eating, we’re concentrating on eating. We don’t need the social lunches.”

Always seeking tangible facts and absolute answers, autistic people don’t respond well to open-ended questions and social gestures such as small talk and pleasantries, Lipsky said. They might respond to standard “How are you doing?” greetings with uninvited frankness.

She said she also gets fixated on singular objects, images or ideas, which can lead to trouble, such as wandering off and getting lost or starting down the path toward a meltdown. Autistic people often lack the ability to plan their actions, making them seem impulsive.

Once during a hospital visit, a nurse said Lipsky’s temperature was 92 degrees, which she knew wasn’t correct. She was certain she was running a fever. She obsessed over the discrepancy, and the visit went from one misunderstanding to another until she began to have a fit.

“Thankfully, a lot of you have taken your little baggies and put them on the ground,” she told the attendees, referring to brightly colored bags of materials distributed at the seminar that threatened to monopolize her attention.

A different perspective

She walked briskly between the banquet tables as she talked, and she peppered her presentation with humorous anecdotes, working the room like a comedian. She sometimes performs comedy.

“I want them to laugh and learn,” she said during a break. “I’m a storyteller, and within the story I embed the message.”

In one line that drew a big laugh, she said her husband sometimes puzzles aloud that God seemed to make her highly intelligent and stupid at the same time. “God made me very intelligent so that you would be attracted to me,” she responds. “He also made me very stupid so I would be attracted to you.”

Educators should understand that autistic children aren’t trying to needle or annoy those around them, she said. They are merely reacting to a different perception of the world.

To avoid problems, they need routines and backup plans for when the routines go off track. She suggested letting autistic students change classrooms before other students so the hallways are quiet when they move. She advised teaching them basic statements they can use to defuse awkward social situations, explaining, for example, that they cannot make eye contact because they have sensory difficulties but that they are listening.

She said other children around them should learn about autism. Some of her biggest problems occur when people don’t realize she is autistic and react to her in ways that escalate her agitation. It’s best to respond calmly to a meltdown or other off-center behavior, she said.

Another time, she said, her mother gave her a doll, still pushing the feminine playing idea.

Lipsky went outside and threw the doll 20 feet in the air.

“I beat the crap out of her,” she said. “I took her to the pool and I drowned her. I put her in a shoebox, and I buried her.”

But, she said, when her mother saw that, she barely reacted, apparently not bothered by her daughter’s unconventional way of playing with the doll.